Week two
I’m in the heart of my second week of work, and I still really like my job. I only have a few minutes to post something today before I dig into a fresh batch of projects but I thought I would share how the transition from College to the work-place is going. My suspicions have been largely confirmed. Working 8 hours a day straight through isn’t so bad when you can go home after those 8 hours and just relax and have nothing else to do. I am far busier in this job than I ever expected to be. I’m not at the same level of stressing out with a million different things to take care of, that I was at in school. Instead it’s just kinda nice to know that there will always be something for me to do.
At Offut last summer things were pretty slow and low pressure. I don’t think I had any concrete deadlines the whole summer. In this position I feel the pressure to get things done in the fewest hours possible to save budget, and my deadlines are usually the same day that I first find out about a task. A lot of this is because I am at a point where most of what they are willing to give me are small tasks that only take an hour and a half.
The support aspect of this job accounts for probably 70-80% of my time each day. I answer a few phone calls and lots of e-mails. Today will be my third day using GTDTiddlyWiki a very cool wiki that is helping me keep free form todo lists with some simple formatting. The most powerful thing about a wiki is that it allows for quick and easy cross referencing using WikiWords or forced links using the [[ ]] brackets. So whenever I see an e-mail or take a call I throw a new bullet into the tiddler for todays support items. I put it under the “to do” heading and at the end I have started putting a link to a 5 digit number that I am cycling up. This is my own way of tracking support tickets. I know there are advanced support ticket systems out there, and even some free php/mysql ones too. But I haven’t really looked at them yet and I don’t know if I need to when I am pretty much the only one tracking support issues formally. Everyone else just looks at the emails as they come in and looks to see if someone else sent out a reply. I felt the need for something more structured, but not as confining as a controlled database.
Anyways, it’s only day nubmer 3 for the wiki. We’ll see how long I stick with it.
The coffee they have here at the office is really bad. Oh, and we use these cool CISCO IP phones, and they happen to be the same phones that CTU uses on 24! Now if only I could figure out how to make them ring like the phones on 24.